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THE 



KING OF EIVERS. 



WITH A 



CHART OF OUR SLAVE AND FREE SOIL TERRlipRY. * 






[This article, which appeared in the Democratic Review for December, 1819, is one of the cod- 
cladbs chapters of a work on the policy and resources of the Union, now in preparation for the 
press, entitled " Our Mother Laud." It is published by the Democratic Committee, with tJie consent 
of the Author.] 



N E W - Y O R K : 
CHARLES W00T1 117 JOHN STREET. 



THE 



KING OF RIYEES, 



X7ITH A 



CHART OF OUR SLAVE AND FREE SOIL TERRITORY. 



[This article, which appeared in the Democratic Review for Decemher, 1849, is one of the con. 
eluding chapters of a work on the policy and resources of the Union, now in preparation for the 
press, entitled " Our Mother Land." It is published by the Democratic Committee, with the consent 
of the Author.] 



NEW- YORK: 

CHARLES WOOD, 117 JOHN STREET. 

18 50. 



Democratic Hepublican Young Men's General Committee, 
Tammany Hall, December 20, 1849. 

( EXTRACT FROM MINUTES. ) 

"Resolved, That five thousand copies of the article styled "The 
King of Rivers," be published by this Committee for distribution." 

GARRIT H. STRIKER, JR., 

Chairman. 
0. H. P, TOWNSEND, 
ALEXANDER M. ALLING, 

Secretaries. 



^3 



THE 



The Mississippi is mighty in his imperial dignity, but more 
mighty in his lessons of unity and confederation. That matchless 
tide is the magic cestus which ensures the harmony of the sovereign 
sisters of the Union, and no peevish eruption of unsisterly jealousy 
can dispart the silver zone that so firmly and graciously binds their 
varied climes and products into one common interest. The Mis- 
sissippi is the most persuasive mediator, the most energetic arbiter, 
and the most vigilant defender of the federal compact, linking into 
one chain of communication fourteen powerful states, and nearly 
half our entire population. Gathering to one outlet uncomputed 
thousands of miles of navigable waters; holding in a condition of 
facile interchange a vast series of diverse, yet mutually depen- 
dent, agricultural, manufacturing, mining and commercial inter- 
ests, there is no fraction of the wide territory enfolded in the em- 
brace of the hundred armed river, that could cut itself from the 
rest of the body, without destroying the growth and vigor of its 
own fair proportions. Free-soil Iowa and Illinois may chide the 
heresies of slave-holding Kentucky and Louisiana, but not the less 
must wheat-giowing and lead-producing Iowa and Illinois vend 
their wares, and buy their sugar and cotton, in the markets of their 
southern sisters, while their highway river holds open invitation 
to come and go in unrestrained profit and good will, and rebukes 
the intemperate folly of sectional aggression. 

In ascending the Missls>;ppi, you pass through all the climates 
of the temperate zone, through a countless variety of production, 
through infinite changes of scenery, and through every phase of 
sectional prejudice. Leaving behind, on the fertile, but hot and 
unhealthy sugar plains, the darkest and most tenacious shades of 
African servitude, the tints lighten step by step, and state. by state, 
up to the lofty, health-inspiring shores of genial Kentucky and ad- 



venturous Missouri, where slavery visibly relaxes its grasp ; and 
onward, to the romantic and enchanting heights of Iowa and Wis- 
consin, where it never had a hold, until finally, at Minesota, the 
beautiful cradle of this marvellous stream, and two thousand miles 
above your starting point, where you saw its waves salute the 
sea in sullen grandeur, you hear the brief and proud declaration 
of territorial freedom : " Every state must, and every territory 
ought, decide for itself, and by itself, whether it will admit or ex- 
clude slavery." 

In the month of June, 1849, I stood on the island that cleaves 
asunder the wild chaos of amber-hued waters, forming the catar- 
act of St. Anthony, that second Niagara, whose overwhelming sub- 
limity silences the mortal beholder ; and before that heaven- reared 
altar, with its veil of diamonds, and its rainbow crown, I almost 
vainly essayed to remember there was another world outside of 
this stupendous whirl of elemental warfare — a world of petty 
efforts and pigmy human strifes. Yet there, with nature ringing 
her high eternal anthem in cadence with the plaint, a daughter of 
the Dacotas detailed the wrongs of the red race, and completed a 
lesson which I had half-learned at the other extremity of that far- 
reaching river. 

" Here the torrent is colored with the tears of the red man, for 
the red man's tear is blood," she said, as she extended her grace- 
ful arm towards a rift in the falls where a clear column gleamed 
coral bright through the parted drapery of pearl-white spray. 
" Far away, where our snow-hills are forgotten under a burning 
sky, these waters wear another stain— the stain of the black man's 
tears of dust and sweat." 

A sad truth is shrouded in the Indian girl's wild poetry. Mine- 
sota, Iowa and Wisconsin, grieve over the woes of the African 
slave a thousand miles off, while, with every art of diplomacy and 
war, they chase the poor Indian beyond their border, and take 
counsel, openly, how to despoil him of his hunting grounds, and 
exile him forever from the graves of his ancestors, and the dear 
haunts of his boyish sport and manly daring. 

Louisiana and Mississippi thrill with indignation at the suffer- 
ings of the Indian, as he recedes before the eager march of civili- 
zation, or dies in her embrace ; but they look calmly on the bond- 
age of the African. Each compassionates largely the sin that is 
not of its own neighborhood, and reconciles itself to the pressure 
of the evil at home, until conscience and convenience can meet to 
adjust a settlement, and agree upon the remedy. 

The older states hynted down the red men, and enslaved the 



black ones, until the land was all in white hands, and free servants 
became more profitable than purchased ones, and then conscience 
immediately opened her slumbering eyes and raised her head from 
her gold embroidered pillow to pray for the repose of the slaugh- 
tered Indians, and emancipate her useless Africans. 

Those states which have thoroughly exterminated and dispos- 
sessed the Indians, and who have no large Native American land 
reserves to bar the speed of the axe and the plough within their lim- 
its, are tranquil and tender-hearted on Indian matters, just as those 
who have escaped from the cares and incumbrances of a redun- 
dant negro population, are at leisure to censure those still yoked 
to the burthen. 

In those border states, where they are even now receiving their 
baptism of blood and fire in Indian forays, and where every white 
person counts for the full worth and vjalue of a human being in 
the muster-roll of civilization, they do not dwell so heavily on a 
red man shot, or a black one over-tasked, but they turn pale with 
horror when they read of the stern serfdom of chain and lash in 
which sailors are crushed in our commercial cities, or the hard 
servitude of poverty which binds thousands of young maidens to 
the harsh hours and tasks of our eastern factories. States like 
Kentucky, that have no troublesome Indians in their household — 
that have drained off their superfluous Africans, and are about 
exchanging slave labor for more economical hired service, and 
who are making encouraging advances in mines and manufac- 
tures, contemplate with serene indulgence all the prosperous and 
legalized forms of servitude that flourish in their bounds ; but 
their indulgent moderation aims, nevertheless, at future amend- 
ments. They lead the van from their position in the career of 
amelioration; but it is only by this favored position they are en. 
abled to be such clear exemplars, and so far ahead in the school 
of fraternity. In time, the dwellers in more ungenial latitudes 
will come up to the point these leaders now occupy, for freedom 
and light are urging all their children on the upward course. In 
the glance backward over the path they have travelled, the fore- 
most pretenders to supreme humanity must confess the lesson 
taught by the desert-born, but educated daughter of the Dacota 
chief at St. Anthony's Falls. 

Oppressors and oppressed dwell everywhere ; but it is only the 
unfamiliar form that moves general and active abhorrence. This 
impulse against African servitude which agitates the northern 
states — to whom it is unknown — and exasperates in its defence 
the south, who declares it a stringent necessity of self-preserva- 



6 

tion to the whites, is — at least with the masses — but a geographi- 
cal morality. A humanity of latitude and longitude, modified by 
climate, relaxing under the moist heats of the south, and intensi- 
fying in the cold winters of New-England. 

In three short weeks I had touched the extremes of southern 
and northern oppression. On the same river, under the same re- 
ligion, government and language, I had seen the African in he- 
reditary bondage, hopeless of freedom for himself or children, and 
daily driven to his task by bodily fear, yet careless and content 
in his glossy well-fed health, and making the sunny plains resound 
with his songs, until the most resolute abolitionists doubted wheth- 
er this child of an undeveloped race, still in the imbecility of its 
unprepared animal dependence, did not require the social polity 
that gives him a master to tend his wants and compel him to learn 
the use of his hands and mind. 

On the upper waters of the river I saw the home of Black 
Hawk and his braves in the occupation of the whites, and heard 
the broken-hearted remnant of his tribe reltite in a cold despair, 
too deep for tears and complaints, that the barren desert assign- 
ed them by a mocking treaty was whitening with the bones of 
half their women and children. They did not lament — but they 
did not smile — when they told that beside every lodge was a 
grave. I saw the Dacotas, who have of their kindred many 
educated persons of mi.xed blood intermarried with their plun. 
derers, yielding up in stern and silent gloom their chosen hunt- 
ing grounds, and their sacred altar stones, hallowed by im- 
memorial tradition of martial rites and Dacota glory ; and none 
could look upon this decaying race, and upon the stony, joyless 
composure with which they face the path of exile and death, and 
say as we do of the laughing, dancing slaves, "This is a happy 
race." The dweller on the Upper Mississippi puts his foot on the 
neck of the expiring Indian, as he exclaims, "Behold the cruelty of 
the slave-holder." The dweller on the Lower Mississippi raises 
the lash over the African, and retorts, "Behold the injustice of 
the Indian-oppressor." Missouri and Kentucky, who have tasted 
both evils and yielded to both temptations, turn to the north and 
to the south, and say, "Judge ye gently one of the other, for ye 
know not the weight of your brother's cross." 

THE LAND OF THE SUGAR-CANE. 

Louisiana is the sugar plantation of the Union, and no soil in 
its limits yields a more generous return to the cultivator, but in 



entering the state from the gulf it gives no such promise of wealth 
and fertility. We left the bright and lovely banks of CorpusChristi, 
where the flowers never cease to bloom, and the fresh breeze never 
forgets to play in the fairy groves that dot, like emeralds of deeper 
tint, the green savannas, and it was a chilling contrast to meet at 
the mouth of the river the dreary waste of turbid waters cutting 
their sullen way through the still more dreary expanse of black 
mud. All the southern border of Louisiana is a labyrinth of wide 
shallow lakes, interlaced by sluggish bayous, and surrounded by 
interminable marshes, seamed at intervals with veins of higher 
land along the water-courses. Forts Jackson and St. Philip stand 
on the dividing line, between the domain of man and reptiles, for 
it is just at the head of the vast peninsula of mud, created by the 
river sediment, and not yet solid enough to bear trees in which 
the wide current divides itself and seeks the sea by several chan- 
nels. Above, cultivation begins to be possible ; below, only the 
alligators can find a home. An isolated pilot village — an an- 
chorage of handsome white houses — has started up at the Balize, 
and greets the eye like a cluster of lilies in a dark marsh ; but 
that is a commercial, not an agricultural growth. 

After passing the forts, the "coast" soon becomes radiant with 
verdure and beauty. The voices of busy men come from the field, 
the plantation houses glance brightly out of their bowers of foliage, 
and every sight and sound is redolent of luxuriant fertility. This 
" coast" is nevertheless a proverb of fear to the slave. Its sugar 
plantations accept for their severe toil the stupid, vicious and re- 
fractory slave drainage of all the states, and here exists the harsh- 
est discipline and the least kindly bonds between slave and mas- 
ter. Yet the negro population thrives more gaily under even these 
disadvantages than in the mildest of the free states. They have 
no heed for the future, and are not loaded with the cares of self- 
government. Let it be understood that I touch not the justice or 
injustice of slavery. I deal simply with the facts within my sphere 
of observation, and leave what is above my handling to divines 
and philosophers. The slave population of Louisiana seems to be 
in that primary stage of developement in which the animal nature 
predominates ; and if the animal wants are satisfied, and the fee- 
bler mental capacities not overtaxed, they are happy. This whole 
region is so noxious to white constitutions that it would lie un- 
drained and useless ; and we should have to resign altogether 
the production of sugar and rice, until we had reared in starving 
poverty a Paria caste of whites miserable enough to undertake 
it, if we had not a race of African laborers to whom it is more 



8 

genial. The redemption of five millions of acres, now subject to 
overflow, but capable of rich returns in rice and sugar, will add 
immensely to the health and beauty of Louisiana, as well as to 
the productive wealth of the Union ; but under existing circum- 
stances it could only be done by whites at an outlay of life and 
suffering far beyond all the blacks endure. The acquisition, in 
180.3, of the Mississippi Valley and its noble highway, doubled 
the territory of the states, and greatly increased the power and 
standing of the nation, by giving it the control of the cotton 
supply in the markets of Europe. This sudden and gigantic 
step in annexation struck terror into the hearts of all the timid 
patriots in the Union. They predicted the disruption of such an 
unwieldly, overgrown republic, and declared it to be impossi- 
ble to govern and defend such an extent of thinly populated 
territory. Above all, the anti-slavery men, who were not then a 
sectional party, but scattered lightly all over the country, north 
and south, inquired anxiously how the accession of a new twen- 
tieth to the number of slaves was to affect the course of emanci- 
pation. Time has answered all these questions. 

In 1800 the immense valley, watered by the King of Rivers and 
his tributaries, had less than four hundred thousand civilized in- 
habitants — about one-fourteenth part of the population — now it 
has seven millions, and counts one-thiixl of the votes of the Union- 
Then the colored population iiiade one-fifth of the whole, now ii; 
is reduced to a seventh, and the white preponderance is increas- 
ed every year by emigration from Europe. 

Of the states formed out of this territory, five are free-soil and 
six are slave-holding ; but of the latter, two are preparing to eman- 
cipate before 1860, and another — Minesota — will come in a free- 
soil state, so that this region, at the present rate of progress, will 
number, in a very short time, eight free stales to four that are 
slave-holding, and this early result I impute chiefly to the exten- 
sion of slave limits. The introduction of a new and enormously 
profitable cultivation, which, from the peculiar nature of the soil 
and climate, was unwholesome for the whites, created a rapid de- 
mand for negroes on the sugar-cane fields of Louisiana, and raised 
the price of slaves throughout the Union. Tobacco was still a 
highly encouraging crop, and cotton was about to become one of 
our most precious staples, so that the older southern states had a 
home demand that aided to enhance the rising value of slaves, and, 
in a parallel degree, the wages of free labor. The northern 
states felt the advance in the wages of their hired servants, and 
the corresponding high standard of dress, food and comforts foi 




^ 



10 

their slaves, which public opinion and the example of white labor- 
ers enforced on the masters. The rearing and maintenance of 
slaves became, on the average, more than their services were 
worth, and the most robust workers were gradually sent towards 
the south, which also became the punishment of the heavy-headed 
and unmanageable. Their place was supplied by emigrants from 
Europe, who were attracted by the large wages and cheap lands of 
the young republic even before they learned to appreciate its insli- 
tutions. The character of the colored population in the northern 
states, thus purified of its roughest dross, soon attained the level 
of self-government. Emigration more than filled the blank left 
by the retiring blacks, and labor kept its balance with capital. If 
there had been no addition to our cotton lands, and if sugar had 
not come to demand new laborers at anj- price, wages would have 
crept up more slowly, and there would have been less inducement 
for foreigners to come to this country. The impetus from the cane- 
brakes of Louisiana vibrated to the shores of Ireland. The long 
file of toilers that marched into the fertile but fever- reeking plains 
of the Mississippi was not broken, until, at New- York, the last 
departing rank saw itself crowded away, and its place taken by a 
sturdier and more intelligent European band. The servitude of 
wages had supplanted the servitude of purchase. It is not a pal- 
atable truth, but it is a truth, nevertheless. No state has eman- 
cipated until the colored population was inferior in numbers to 
the laboring class of whites, and at that point slavery becomes a 
burthen, and it is gently put to death. Thus the apparent gain 
to slavery of a vast territory really set free as many states at the 
north, and even the addition of resident slaves it made at one ex- 
tremity of the Union was more than balanced by the number 
emancipated at the other. In the great valley itself, the call of 
slaves towards the south opened a speedier day of entire freedom, 
by diluting and thinning that class of servants, and inviting in, 
with the temptation of ready work and wages, a higher order of 
white service. Slaves never were profitable in New-England, 
because the quality and quantity of clothing, bedding and hous- 
ing, required in their long, cold wi, iters, was an over-balancing 
item. There is so much care, thrift, and intelligence demanded 
in the usual routine of labor in that hard-featured land, that a heed- 
less and improvident race was rather a burden than a profit — ta- 
ken, as slaves must be, from the cradle to the grave — and New- 
England generally sold to milder latitudes the Africans her ships 
brought to America. She was an importer, not an employer of 
negroes ; and when the slave trade was abolished she forthwith 



n 

washed her l)ands of the whole business, and set down conscience' 
clean to lecture her neighbors on their slow-paced morality. 



THE CRESCENT CITY. 

In ascending the Mississippi, it is well to pause and observe, in 
its very citadel, the workings of slavery. It is the fashion to say, 
that the mere presence of slavery stagnates the flow of industry, 
and impedes ruinously the prosperous advance of any country ; 
and there is a certain amount of truth in this — as there is in all 
popular errors • for they must have a little breath of vitality to 
live — but it is a partial and distorted truth. 

It is true, that educated and self-governing industrial classes 
are the ablest supporters of the state, but all producers have their 
value. 

Of all the cities in the Union. New-Orleans is the only one that 
doubled its population in two successive census decades, ending 
in 1840, though Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Louisville, did nearly 
the same thing. In each case this miraculous prosperity has the 
same magnificent source — a free water transit by river, lake and 
canal, of well nigh twenty thousand miles. The character and 
resources of the country in tribute to the respective cities will, if 
studied with other local causes, explain perfectly the variations 
in their present and future career, independent of the question, 
whether the bone and sinew expended there were strained under 
the urgings of hunger or of the lash. With a free commerce, at 
home and abroad, and the natural mart of the fifteen degrees of 
climate and latitude, for which the Mississippi is the conductor of 
trade, New-Orleans must be rich and powerful. Her straight, 
well-paved, nobly built streets, with their colonnades of beautiful 
trees, her stately edifices, her splendid charities, her river embank- 
ments of almost fabulous cost, her railroads, her canals, her su* 
burb towns, that are themselves fair and prosperous cities, were 
all redeemed from a pestilential morass ; and — like the capitol of 
llome and the temples of Greece — it is the labor of slave hands. 
The slave markets of those illustrious republics stood in the midst 
of their forums and palaces, while one taught and the other con- 
quered the world ; but it is not a necessary sequence that the lords 
of ancient civilization were sinless in forgetting the rights of toil, 
any more than the modern planter or manufacturer who imitates 
their oversight. The 'noblest men and the proudest nations of all 
ages have been more or less thralled in defective systems, and on- 



12 

ly the Supremely Wise, who sees ail the antecedents and all the 
environments of the case, can decide how far they are the mas- 
ters, and how far the victims of their lot. The majestic steamers 
that border the Crescent City like a forest, seem full of life and 
power, but they can only move on the element on which they find 
themselves, and blindly obey the small and simple wheel that ap- 
pears so insignificant in the general mass. Man's interest is the 
governing wheel, and circumstances, born before he saw the light, 
compose the elements of his action. Almost divine must be the 
natu re that can altogether shape these influences to his aspirations. 
The progress of the amelioration of the African family is wit- 
nessed at New-Orleans with more distinctness than anywhere else. 
Leaving aside those of mixed blood, the blacks who have been four 
or five descents in contact with civilization, and who have been 
taught, though by the rude apprenticeship of slavery, to exert 
their energies, have unfolded into a much higher people than the 
original Africans. The developement of moral and intellectual 
powers has strikingly improved the form and expression of their 
features ; and from a hideous tribe, capable only of animal incen- 
tives, gratifications and attachments, they have been brought up 
to the standard of moral capability. From this vantage ground, 
the race among us will go rapidly forward, under the impetus 
of white example, whether in freedom or servitude. With the 
intrinsic elevation of the colored population, and with the in- 
troduction of white servants, who mark out the pattern, cus- 
tom is commanding for them a system of kinder treatment and 
more generous indulgences from their masters. It is a general- 
ly conceded fact, that the laboring classes of Europe are not so 
well fed and clothed, nor so lightly tasked, as the southern slaves ; 
nor is there in most countries of the old world more attention 
paid to peasent instruction than in Louisiana and Mississippi, 
who have the worst and most uncouth colored population in 
the Union ; and, what is an interesting collateral fact, it is also 
the most indifferent to freedom. I have known many instances of 
slave mothers — of the better order too — such as hair-dressers, la- 
dy's maids, marchandes (those who go about to sell goods,) and 
seamstresses, refuse to make very moderate sacrifices to purchase 
their own and their children's freedom. Whoever has lived much 
in southern cities is aware that large numbers of the brightest 
slaves hire their time of their masters, at a fixed price, and work 
out at their trades to great advantage for themselves. Almost 
any of these could buy their freedom by practising, for a few 
years, the industry and economy which a free-born man of the 



13 

north must practise all his life, to win a decent independence ; 
yet it seldom happens that one of them will make the necessary 
self-denial. There are noble exceptions, but they are rare. The 
race is not yet cultivated up to the point at which intellectual as- 
pirations overcome animal propensities ; and it is a question with 
some, whether that point can possibly be attained in slavery. The 
whites have attained it in other countries, under equal or greater 
disadvantages, and the yoke of serfdom fell from their necks. Let 
us hope everything therefore for the blacks. 

The northern states, when lightened of the guardianship of a 
numerous class, aliens to them by prejudice and striking physical 
differences, provided liberally for the education of the colored 
children still remaining among them, and in those branches of stu- 
dy which require memory and imitation, rather than research and 
laborious comparison, they have succeeded precisely as vvell as 
the whites. In the full and continued developement of the race 
still higher results will follow. The same results, though more 
imperfect and partial in their scope, are visible at Nev/-Orleans, 
and more particularly in the mixed bloods. That class ai'e polite 
and graceful imitators of the most polished examples they see ; 
they all sing and dance with a certain proficiency, and observe and 
learn whatever falls within the limits of the senses, but they eschew 
vigo'ous mental effort. They are developing under rough tuition, 
but ''■ so far suits their necessities that the improvement is percep- 
tible. The white foreigners, employed in offices one shade above 
them, are their aptest and most efficient teachers ; z.tA this des- 
cription of persons are flowing rapidly into all the ci'ic;5 of the 
south. When I last landed at New-Orleans, a wh.'ie hackman 
conveyed us to the St. Charles, the white porter of that piincely es- 
tablisliDient received the baggage, and white chambermaids at- 
tended me in my apartment. These are the avant couriers of 
emancipation. Slavery has spread over so large a surface that 
its weakened ranks cannot shut out competition, and white com- 
petition is the grave of slave labor. Whenever and wherever the 
white man begins to contend for employment with the African, he 
does not fail to draw reinforcements from the crowded armies of 
his kindred, who await his call ; but the negro cannot recruit on 
this continent. He can only thin the states that are drawing 
close their lines for emancipation, and hasten for them the day 
that must eventually dawn for every state that opens its gates to 
emigration. 



14 



THE TRANSITION STATES. 



Afte.r passing the land of sugar and rice, and almost the land 
of cotton, we come upon the debateable ground which separates 
the sunny slave-cultivated plains of the South from the wheat 
fields and free labor of the Upper Mississippi. Kentucky and 
Missouri have not yet escaped from the pressure of a surplus 
colored population, and therefore have not attained the pure and 
unrelenting anti-slavery feeling of the exempted States ; but the 
tide of emigration from Europe and the North is rolling on. and 
negro servitude must retire before it. A varied and complicated 
system of production in mines, factories, and a subdivided agri- 
culture, presents itself in these States, and demands a higher and 
more intelligent class of laborers. The Old World is pouring 
in its thousands and tens of thousands of artisans and farmers to 
fill this demand, on such economical terms as will displace slave- 
ry. From Missouri eastward, a zone of five States is trembling 
in the balance of transition. A reluctance — natural to their po- 
sition and honorable to their good faith — to abandon their old 
allies, the slave-holders, not to mention the embarrassment of dis- 
posing of a large colored population, retards decisive action, but 
the struggle is closing upon them, and can only end in one way. 
Slavery has been driven from the whole area of the fifteen free 
States as an unprofitable burden ; for it is a solemn truth, that no 
State cast it off while it was thought profitable — and its death- 
knell would now be ringing in all this broad sweep of transition 
States, from Delaware and Maryland, through Virginia, Kentucky 
and Missouri, on and on, to the Pacific, if, besides the check of 
sectional agitation, there did not rise on either side a wall of ob- 
struction against the drainage of their superfluous blacks. On 
the South, the slave States resolutely shut their doors, in self-de- 
fence, against the admission of free colored persons. They have 
already more than they know what to do with, and but for higher 
considerations of humanity, their interests would counsel a gene- 
ral expulsion of the whole class from the slave borders. On the 
North, there is almost as much discouragement. Some States 
absolutely refuse them an asylum, and in the remainder there is 
but cold welcome and scant employment for uninstructed blacks 
among the swarming thousands of white emigrants. It is not the 
least curious feature of our geographical morality, that it has 
never occurred to but one or two States in the Union to apply 
the abstract benevolence which they are so enthusiastic in teach- 



15 

ing to others, to the short-comings of their own position. Some 
States will not grant a shelter at all to the colored race, and few, 
indeed, have allowed them even a limited franchise ; but mo8t of 
them are willing to make up for this cold protection at home, by 
excessively warm lectures to the South in their belialf. This is 
well I for, in time, their impressive rhetoric on equity and equali- 
ty may produce its fruits, and they may enter in very truth into 
all the blessings, social and political, of amalgamation. Heaven 
may deign, at last, to smile upon their sublime and unwearied 
efforts to this deserved fruition, but thus far such nrc not the 
signs of promise. A deep antipathy is rising and strengthening 
against these unfortunate aliens throughout the land. Any ca: •■ 
ful observer may read, in the firmament, clouds of retaliation and 
expulsion that will fall upon the race whose presence caused our 
domestic broils, whenever the storm breaks and the sky clears. 
The emancipation of this belt of transition States, v.-hich must en. 
sue from the natural and uncontrollable laws of population, im- 
mediately that sectional opposition relaxes, will be the signal A)r 
vast and energetic measures for the transportation of the Africans 
to the original seat of their race. 

The presence of a people with whom they do not think it well 
or wise to intermarry, is a light thing in Maine, New Hampshire 
or Vermont, Avhere the colored persons — besides being of a caste 
infinitely superior to those of the South, by education and admix- 
ture of blood — are only as one in three hundred to the whites, or 
even in Massachusetts, where they count about one in a hun- 
dred ; but it is more serious when, as in Delaware, Maryland 
and Virginia, they make one third of the whole population. The 
third, it must not be forgotten, which, from its moral and intel- 
lectual unpreparedness, is certain to be burthensome to the State. 
In Missouri and Kentucky, immigration has probably by this 
time — the eve of 1850 — reduced the black population nearer a 
fourth of their entire population; but still the grave question is 
before them, " What is to be done with this mass of 150,000 souls 
of African descent ?" 

This is a question which European philosophy finds so simple 
at three thousand miles distance. It replies, " Open to them 
your ballot-boxes and your family relations." But this side the 
Atlantic we have an invincible prejudice against this benevolent 
proposal of mixing to the Quadroon tint half of the States of the 
Confederation, or giving to the African suffrages the balance of 
power. Ungenerous, and unreasonable too, as it seems to people 
three thousand miles off, not one of the " Transition States"' would 



10 

consent to this arrangement, and however liberal the theories and 
wishes of the Northern negropMhs may be, none have spoken of 
enforcing their practical adoption at the point of the bayonet. 

Missouri and Kentucky will not pause, however, in their ca- 
reer of emancipation. In the last ten yeai's they have more than 
trebled their white laborers of the class in immediate competition 
with the colored producers. This has crowded the latter out of 
many branches of industry, and diminished the profits of slave- 
owning in a corresponding degree. To speak with more precK 
sion, white labor has underbid black, though both are well repaid 
in those favored States, and hire is becoming more safe and satis- 
factory to the employer than the risk and outlay of purchase. 
The same causes have swept steadily southward from the begin- 
ning of our nationality, and the march has never been swerved 
by any moral consideration from its chart of latitude. Slavery 
has receded before the climate and white laborers of the fifteen 
most ungenial States, and is only allowed a temporary halt in 
five more, who are flanked in prospective by two new ones in the 
Far West. California and Deseret continue the line from the 
Atlantic to the Pacific, across the fairest portion of the continent. 
On and above this transition line are mines adequate to the sup- 
ply of the world in valuable metals, water power to manufacture 
for the world, land to subsist in luxury a hundred millions, and 
means of intercommunication which the world may well envy. 
With this guarantee of twenty-four free soil States by 1860 — for 
Minesota and Oregon will come into the ranks with the transi- 
tion States — leaving of the present muster-roll but ten slave- 
holding States, who could be so weak as to fear the addition of 
one, two, or three slave States ? Who does not see that the har- 
mony and balance of the Union could not be endangered if all 
the continent south of the transition line down to the Isthmus were 
added to the slave-holding power ? It would still be in the mi- 
nority in territory, in population, and in States. If the slave 
force were diluted by spreading it over a larger surface, it would 
only invite more early and more urgently the presence and com- 
petition of free labor, and quicken the day of its final extinction. 
The map of the United States and the tables of emigration refute, 
in brief and irresistible logic, the fear, if there is really any one 
who entertains it, of the extension or preponderance of the slave 
influence. 



17 



THE NECESSARY ULTIMATE OF SLAVERY, 

It is conceded that slavery cannot retrograde to the realms it has 
left behind, nor can it ever obtain any effective foothold westward 
or northward of its present limits, however it might be tolerated 
by law. The whole nature of the country and its productions, 
and the increasing momentum of the emigrant power, join to for- 
bid the possibility. We have in this vast domain space for forty 
of the largest states, and we have emigrants landing on our shores 
at a rate to settle half a dozen of them in a year. If those labor- 
ing foreigners do not instantly urge before them into the unsettled 
territories the population requisite to entitle those territories to a 
name and place among the sovereignties of the Confederation, they 
remain in the older states to crowd forward our native-born mass- 
es to higher aims in newer fields, and to hurry away the linger, 
ing obstacle of slave preponderance in the transition states. 

Already in the three-quarters just closed, of this year of 1849, 
it is computed that 300,000 strangers have come to our soil for 
fortune or refuge ; and if this number were evenly divided among 
five territories demanding admittance to the national councils, they 
could not be refused — if the constitution is valid. It is not an act 
of condescension and free-grace in Congress to accept a state when 
it presents itself under the conditions prescribed by the constitu- 
tion — it is an imperative duty. It is for the state, in the attributes 
of her sovereign power, of which she cannot divest herself, and 
which cannot be bartered away in her territorial minority, to ar- 
range her own provisoes, and govern, like all her peers, her own 
domestic institutions, in her own independent manner. Yet there 
is, every year, less and less possibility of creating slave states, 
for the simple and definite lack of slave material. 

The map of this union of states offers a cooling balm to who- 
ever has a feverish dread of" extending slavery," It proves this 
"extension" a distinct impossibility, unless we borrow a new popu- 
lation from Africa to people the new states. When our Revolution- 
ary sires swore to the Federal compact on the altar they had reared 
to Liberty, they and the states they represented were all slave-hold- 
ing. There was not a spot of free-soil in Christian possession on 
this continent when they proclaimed the Charter of Independence 
and Confederation, Then all the great powers of Christendom were 
slave-traders, and endless were the disputes and diplomacy between 
Most Catholic Spain, and Christian France, and England, " the ex- 
ample of nations," for a monopoly of its honors and profits. They 
claimed it between them and wrangled for the largest share, a3 



18 

they had divided and monopolized this continent. American colo- 
nies received the slave-trafficking vices vj^ith the language and laws 
of their mother-country ; yet the Old Thirteen, of their own free- 
will and judgment, estopped the importation of slaves, though their 
wide extent of sparsely-settled territory cried aloud for more labor- 
ers. Of the brave Old Thirteen, seven of the states (for Delaware 
is on the fence) have withdrawn from slavery, and far more than 
half of the population and of the acquired territory is with them ; 
and half the area and people of the remaining states are preparing 
to follow this illustrious example. 

How can a statesman so trifle with his reputation for sagacity 
as to speak of apprehensions of the " extension of slavery," when 
he knows the very children of this land of light can prove their 
fallacy by a reference to a chart of the republic — that true and 
noble guide in which they are rarely uninstructed. The first 
sprightly boy of twelve he meets from our public schools, will run 
his finger up Delaware Bay, along the south line of Pennsylvania, 
then down the Ohio and up the Mississippi, until he touches the 
north line of Missouri, and again along that line and down the 
western limits of that state and Arkansas, to the Red River, and 
this child will tell him that all these fifteen largest states of the 
Union north and west of this line, and all the immense domain 
beyond them, and all their eleven or twelve millions of inhabitants, 
are non-slaveholding ; and every one of them, from old Massa- 
chusetts to young Iowa, by their unbiassed act, for no pre-engage, 
ments — if they existed — could bind the will of an independent 
state. If the grave statesman doubts, this child will also assure 
him that every one of the forty states yet to arise in this outside 
domain must inherit the same rights of sovereignty, yet from the 
circumstances of latitude and production, every one of them will 
step into Congress a non-slaveholder, as one after the other they 
receive baptism and confirmation in the congregation of republics. 

Again, this youthful finger, anxious to re-assure the old man 
who is afraid to trust the Republic and her children, will trace the 
south line of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Mis- 
souri — those .'•tates now visibly moving from slave to free culti- 
vation, anC vho have been, and are, the bulwarks and nursing 
mothers of the younger states — and then this stripling of twelve, 
full of the confidence and enthusiasm of a nursling of the Union, 
will say, " When, in 1860, I cast my first vote, all these states 
will have passed through their transition trials, and this whole 
area, three times as large as all New-England, and even now hav- 
ing a greater population, will be free-soil and belted with other 



(% 



19 

free-soil states not yet marked out or named in the maps of civil- 
ization, besides Nebrasca and Minesota." The eloquent politi- 
cian takes counsel with his fears, and perchance with his ambition, 
how to retain an excuse for his resounding lamentations on the 
" immoral and destructive extension of slave limits ;" but he can- 
not impress them on the boy of the common schools, for there he 
has been taught to understand the map, the history, and the consti- 
tution of his mother-land, and nothing can shake his loving faith in 
her wisdom and equity. For all reply to the vehement declarations 
of the graybeard, that she is slow, false, corrupt, imperfect, and 
unsatisfactory — the hopeful and trusting boy will turn to the sec- 
ond class of transition states, and dashing along the south margin 
of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, and on until he is 
lost in the unexplored Centralia of the west, he will add, " In 1860 
there will be in those states moi*e free white emigrants than slaves ;• 
and in ten years, or less, throughout the whole Union, if foreign 
emigration remains but at its present rate, the entire black popu- 
lation, free and slave, will be outnumbered by the Europeans who 
come here for work, and then all this region will be engaged in 
dismissing their slaves. These facts are taught in our schools ; 
are they deceitful, sir ? " The statesman still hesitates to believe 
in the advancement and integrity of the Confederation, and he 
asks : " Where, then, do you children of to-day, who are to be 
men and voters in 1860, expect to find the limits and proportions 
of the positively slave-holding states, when a little later you shall 
come to the active guardianship of the Republic ? " 

" It will be confined to South Carolina and Georgia of the origi- 
nal thirteen, and the five states on the Gulf of Mexico — to less 
than an eighth of the territory, and less than a sixth of the popu- 
lation of the United States." 

Well might the rebuked declaimer against the repose and ex- 
isting policy of the Union pause to inquire why he would arrest 
the mighty wheel of progress, and endanger the noble machinery 
of the Confederation, to brush away a^speck of dust that clings 
to its band of wisdom-tempered steel. 




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